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Our National Development 

AN ADDRESS 

Delivered before the Alumni of the University of 
Pennsylvania, at their Annual Reunion, 
June seventeenth, 1902 

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BY 



DAVID J. HILL, LL.D. 



PHILADELPHIA : 

AVIL PRINTING COMPANY 

1902 



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"le 25 1914 



Our National Development. 



Those of us who are not old, but are old enough to have 
lived through the latter half of the nineteenth century, have 
found nothing in our experience so impressive as our present 
national development. 

The spirit of the last century found its most fitting and 
unobstructed field of action in the boundless territory and 
inexhaustible resources of our country. Here fertile lands, 
abundant opportunities, unrestricted civic rights, and the vision 
of limitless personal advancement attracted the restless millions 
of Europe, and they streamed across the Atlantic to sv^ell our 
native population, pushing their way westward over the great 
plains, and filling the land with the virility of the migratory 
races who become the pioneers and the conquerors of the 
world. As the result of this great movement, several single 
States of the Union now contain a greater population than the 
whole country at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
Yet, notwithstanding the tributary streams that have flowed 
into the main current, to augment the volume of our national 
life, like the great Gulf Stream that journeys silently and irre- 
sistibly onward beneath the surface of the deep, swallowing 
up in its broad pathway the surface commotions of storm and 
tempest, the directing impulse given by the first settlers of our 
country has swept into its movement the ignorance, the passion, 
and the race proclivities of those who have poured into our 
population from other lands, and imparted to them that 
"Americanism" which was created by the founders of the 
nation — the quality of faith in the better attributes of man and 
the co-operation of a free society in the development of all his 
powers. 

Every characteristic of the nineteenth century became more 
sharply accentuated in the United States than anywhere else in 
the world. Here science took the practical turn of mechanism 

(3) 



and speedily blossomed into invention. The literary instinct, 
in haste to make itself effective, threw down the pen as too 
tardy for minds impatient of utterance, and, bursting spon- 
taneously from the lips of men, our native thought flowered 
into oratory and anecdote — our characteristic forms of expres- 
sion as a people. Education, sought by the masses in the 
pifblic school, made haste to found the academy and the college, 
and even to extemporize the university. Religion, stirred to 
enterprise by the spirit of the community, fervidly imagined 
the sect predestined to the conquest of the world and aspired 
to build the only true church in every frontier settlement. 
Speed, immaturity, and extravagance became the characteris- 
tics by which the American was known by the foreigner, who 
saw nothing but the salient points of our civilization, and took 
no knowledge of the insistent forces that were pressing the 
nation on to its position of leadership in the destinies of the 
world. 

The two great constructive agencies of modem times — the 
two forces which made the nineteenth century notable for 
progress in the history of the world — were, beyond question, 
the democratic and the scientific movements. The one pre- 
pared the social conditions of human progress by securing 
to the people the right of popular representation and better 
legislation ; the other furnished the means of economic advance 
by disclosing new methods of control over the forces of nature. 

Nowhere in the world do these two agencies enjoy such 
unrestricted action as in the United States. Here political 
freedom liberated completely the intelligence of the people and 
brought the economic process to the highest pitch of intensity 
it has ever attained. 

Leaving to the local communities the conduct of their 
immediate affairs, the Constitution provided a universal safe- 
guard for all the greater human interests — life, liberty, the 
security of person and of property, freedom of religious 
opinion, worship, and, above all, an open arena of public dis- 
cussion, with equal rights and equal opportunities for all alike 
Thus, by one act, the American citizen was put in possession 
of a complete charter of liberties and left to work out his plans 
of life in the happy consciousness that the results of his labor 



5 

would be secured to him without the possibiHty of royal 
robbery, feudal extortion or the risk of political revolution. 

I have said the risk of political revolution, for of all the 
forms of government now existing in the world, the American 
is the most secure of permanence. Despotisms depend upon 
the caprices of a sovereign, a pure democracy may be swayed 
by the passions or convulsions of a multitude, and even the 
much lauded British Constitution may be altered by a simple 
majority of Parliament, but the American Constitution is not 
only planted upon the equal and absolute rights of all the 
citizens, but it cannot be changed without a mature and 
deliberate expression of the will of the whole people. 

Further guarded by the system of party government, the 
r^hts of the American citizen are hedged around with a 
aouble security ; for individual impulses, local usurpations, class 
pretensions, and theoretical fanaticisms cannot readily impress 
tnemselves upon the great national party organizations, and 
are held back from becoming effective by their inability to 
permeate so great a mass. Reforms also proceed with less 
rapidity on this account, and must fight their way to general 
recognition before they acquire the authority of law ; but when 
we consider the tendency to over legislation, the number of 
purely visionary reforms that are proposed, and the experi- 
mental instincts of the people, we must look upon the great 
party organizations as bulwarks of conservatism almost as 
important as the Constitution itself, while in their rotation of 
power they bring to the test opposing principles, after keeping 
them for a time in the open forum of debate, and leave an 
escape from armed revolt against mistaken legislation in the 
alternative of dismissing the offending party from power and 
putting its opponent in its place. 

Under social conditions which made it possible for all men 
TO hope for all things the knowledge of how to attain them 
became the great desideratum of the people. The press, the 
school, the college, the technical and professional courses of 
training, all became ministrants to the expanding intelligence 
of the country. Every form of activity became intensified by 
the immense energy liberated under favorable conditions and 
concentrated upon the legitimate tasks of life. 



6 

It is by contact with the actual work of the world, in 
developing the country, that our people have obtained that 
discipline which solidifies character and makes a nation strong 
and great by peopling it with citizens able to do great deeds, 
because they have been trained in the school of achievement. 
The great value of struggle to a nation is not in the material 
results it may produce, but in the educational effect of effort 
upon the development of the people. Our recent emergence 
into the field of world influence has not been the result of a few 
naval victories and the conquest of oceanic islands. We must 
seek deeper down for the causes of that new unfolding of our 
destiny as a nation. The victories which have attracted the 
attention of the world were not won at Manila and Santiago 
alone, but in the grim steel works of Johnstown and Pittsburg, 
the clattering shipyards of Philadelphia and San Francisco, 
the quiet class-rooms at Annapolis, and the work shops where 
the sense of mechanical forces and relations was drilled into 
the intelligence of men who worked the engines and fired the 
guns. Without these and similar auxiliaries and antecedents, 
which predetermined victory when brought into action by 
trained commanders, our navy would have been swept from the 
sea and our coast towns would have been threatened by Spanish 
guns. 

Looking back over the whole period of national development, 
we now realize that our ascendency in the economic world has 
been the result of a grand emancipation — first, political, creat- 
ing social conditions in which every individual could, without 
hindrance, exercise all his powers and secure the results of his 
labors; second, intellectual, striking off the fetters of thought 
and freeing intelligence for independent activity ; and third, 
industrial, opening the whole country to free enterprise and 
interchange, embodying in skilfully adapted mechanism the 
application of science, and thus creating upon this continent 
the widest area of absolutely free exchange now existing in 
the world. 

Throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century, our 
vision was turned inward and limited by our continental boun- 
daries. To build up within them a great system of diversified 
industries, and for this purpose to exclude the competition of 



other nations, was our principal national ambition. But in the 
last years of that century the whole order of things was 
changed. Notwithstanding a foreign war, we found ourselves 
competing with other nations, and sending our manufactured 
products to every civilized country, not only to South America, 
to the Orient, to Russia, and to France, but even beer to 
Germany, cotton prints to Manchester, iron to Birmingham, 
steel to Sheffield, and locomotives for the principal railways of 
England. 

We realized with a startling suddenness that we had entered 
upon a new era. Never before in any country was there a 
deeper consciousness of national solidarity than when the 
nation awoke, as out of a profound sleep, to a sense of its 
power, its future, and its responsibilities at the close of the 
war with Spain. With a complete mastery of the continent 
as a consolidated domain, with insular possessions in the 
Atlantic and the Pacific, with a foreign commerce never before 
equaled, and with an industrial prosperity that filled us with 
surprise, we found ourselves included in the group of great 
powers that control the future of mankind upon the globe, and 
the centre of an international interest expressing itself in 
attestations of friendship and good will by all the nations of 
Europe. 

Commercially, it is no longer a choice between merely con- 
tinental and oceanic trade; for if our foreign exports were 
suddenly to cease, it would deplete our national surplus of 
trade by more than six hundred millions of dollars, with con- 
sequences disquieting to contemplate. Diplomatically, it is no 
longer a question of a policy of isolation, for our position in 
the Pacific and our interest in Oriental affairs compel us to a 
participation in the movements of diplomacy that afifect their 
destiny. 

The seas and the oceans, so long regarded as separating 
mankind, are now considered rather as great highways bring- 
ing distant peoples together. The economic impulse which lies 
at the basis of all civilization — the immanent creator of modern 
society — is sending ships to every coast, and to every island of 
the ocean, in quest of commodities or in search of new markets. 
So great a factor of the world's life cannot be ignored by a 



8 

nation conscious of its public obligations, and least of all by 
one of which de Tocqueville said, nearly three-quarters of a 
century ago, "The Americans are destined to rule the sea as 
the Romans were to conquer the world." 

Even the most conservative conception of a state regards it 
as a defensive organism to protect the interests of its citizens. 
So long as these were mainly bounded by the national frontiers, 
the duties of the government did not extend far beyond them ; 
but now that the enterprise of our citizens has spread over all 
the earth, the nation cannot fulfil its obligations without watch- 
ing and protecting the interests of our citizens wherever they 
may be. For this daily duty, more than for the defence of 
our coasts against foreign aggression, we have need of that 
splendid police force of the ocean, our gallant and faithful 
American navy, whose cost has paid such munificent dividends 
in the new respect with which our flag and our country are 
regarded by all mankind. 

But the new world relations in which we stand have brought 
us in contact with a deeper and graver question : the problem 
of our national duty with respect to the social and political 
organization of humanity ; for henceforth mankind will tend 
to be regarded as one great family of nations and of races, to 
be organized upon principles of universal order and justice, 
which will give security to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness in every part of the world. 

The doctrine cannot be laid down and justified before the 
conscience and intelligence of civilized nations that great and 
fertile spaces of the earth's surface are to be left as permanent 
reservations for the perpetuation of primitive indolence and 
savage customs, on the grormd that every people has an inher- 
ent right to local independence and to resist every form of 
government which it is not disposed to obey or able to create. 

It may, indeed, be necessary to revise the political philosophy 
inherited from the eighteenth century — Rousseau's beautiful 
dream of a primitive golden age when society was formed by 
a compact of innocent equals — for the nineteenth century has 
transformed all our general conceptions, and in the great idea of 
evolution has furnished us with the master-key of all scientific 
thinking. In the light of that great principle it is now evident 

\ 



9 

that constitutions are growths rather than artificial creations, 
that institutions are an affair of race and develop only as an 
expression of racial progress, and that political minority is 
a condition as natural and as necessary to races as it is to 
individual men. 

What, then, is the duty of the great civilized nations to those 
members of the human family who have not yet reached their 
political majority? Is it not, in all brotherly kindness, to exer- 
cise such authority as may be necessary to preserve the funda- 
mental rights of society; and, — leaving for consideration at 
the proper time such great and mature political prerogatives 
as the elective franchise, national independence, and its correla- 
tive responsibility, national sovereignty, — to aid by education 
and example all worthy aspirations toward self-government? 
It is thus that the laws of nature, which prescribe the condi- 
tions of development, require us to treat our children. It is 
thus that this nation has just treated little Cuba — "redeemed, 
regenerated and disenthralled" — set as a newly risen star in 
the firmament of the nations, as the proud companion of this 
great constellation of states — a constellation that never shone 
more resplendently than when General Wood, in fulfilment of 
the nation's pledge, bore away from Cuba the insignia of our 
national authority ! And how different is the attitude of this 
nation now, in its strength, from what it was in the days of the 
shameless Ostend manifesto, when our diplomatic representa- 
tives, in the interest of slave labor, assembled to present to 
Spain the alternative of selling Cuba for an arbitrar\^ price, 
or of allowing it to be stripped from her by conquest ! How 
different from that when Texas was annexed, and when Cali- 
fornia and New Mexico were conquered, with the avowed pur- 
pose of extending the area of human slavery ! There is not in 
the history of nations a nobler record of moral development, 
nor a more splendid exhibition of national honor, unselfishness, 
and magnanimity than in the growth of our national purposes 
in the treatment of the island of Cuba. 

But even greater moral qualities than these are required in 
the more trying situation in which the duty of the nation has 
involved us in the Philippines. I well remember the shock of 
surprise with which, after the signing of the treaty of Paris — 



10 

a treaty which had for its intention the most complete emanci- 
pation of the former subjects of Spanish rule — the announce- 
ment was received in Washington that these newly liberated 
people had risen up to smite and expel the armies that had 
freed them from Spain's dominion. It seemed incredible that 
such folly could be perpetrated, that such a misunderstanding 
could exist. The United States had taken in keeping the 
sovereignty of the islands, where no competent local authority 
existed to receive and maintain it. It seemed to us in Wash- 
ington that no happier destiny could come to an oppressed 
people than to be drawn under the protection of the Stars and 
Stripes — the symbol of law and liberty. 

But it is superfluous to dwell upon those recent and pathetic 
events which have required our government to resort to rigor- 
ous measures in order to vindicate the honor of our flag and the 
purposes of the nation. It is sad that this rigor in the estab- 
lishment of civil order should have led to incidents which 
touch our sympathies, but problems of this kind are to be 
solved by the conscience and intelligence of the nation, and 
not merely by its sensibilities. 

There have been other days when the cry of "cruelty" was 
raised as a reproach among us. The awful struggle in which 
millions impoverished their families and shed their blood to 
save the Union — a cause which deeply divided and deeply 
aroused the feelings of the people — the brutal prisons, the red 
debaucheries of war, the long unrest and agonies of dismem- 
bered homes, the dehumanizing influences of the camp, the vili- 
fications of the press, the stinging epithets applied to Lincoln — 
"the bloody tyrant" — and to the soldiers of the North "Lin- 
coln's hired butchers" — all these have gone down in the dark- 
ness of the great gulf now bridged over by the imperishable 
arch of our national unity; but they teach us useful lessons 
when the protest of our sympathies comes into conflict with 
the great national duties that cause us to tremble, till we lift 
our eyes from the valley of decision and behold great principles 
shining down upon us with the calm, steady light of the stars in 
heaven. 

As we set our faces towards the tasks of the future, one 
great, luminous truth brightens the pathway of the nation. 



11 

That truth is that the American people stand before the world 
as the champions of peace, of justice, and of liberty, to whom 
the illusions of empire do not appeal. Law, order, civic rights, 
and amity among the nations, — these are the ideals to which the 
sovereignty of the American people has long been pledged. 
It is a great triumph for human nature that at last a nation 
has come into being to which the liberties of man may safely 
be entrusted, with the certainty that when they are prepared to 
receive them in peace and exercise them with safety to man- 
kind they will be handed back untainted and undiminished, 
with the added guarantee of international respect. 



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